Stole Future: How the How a Dictator Crushed a Young Girl’s Dream
People’s Radio Myanmar
When you hear about Karen State, you imagine breathtaking landscapes, ancient pagodas, and towering limestone mountains. But behind this natural beauty lies a generation of shattered dreams. Ma Pan Hmway is one of them.
The eldest of three children from a poor family in Lun Nya village, she was a high school senior with a very simple dream. During school holidays, she worked hard at her relatives’ homes, saving every penny in a little piggy bank just to buy her
green-and-white school uniform. She loved that uniform. She loved school. Most of all, she wanted to be a teacher.
“I wanted it so badly,” she recalled with a bittersweet smile. “I loved acting like their teacher, and I was thrilled when my friends teasingly called me ‘Madam.’ I didn’t want to teach in the big cities. My dream was to go deep into the villages and teach poor children for free.”
Her passion was so deep that on her walk home from school, she would often hit the bushes by the road with a stick, talking out loud, pretending those bushes were her students.
But on February 1, 2021, everything changed. The military seized power.
At first, like many others, she naively thought the nightmare would end in a few days. Instead, the nightmare grew darker.
Peaceful protests were met with bullets. When she saw junta soldiers open fire on innocent people in her own village, something inside her broke.
She begged her parents to let her drop out of the military-run school. They refused. But she didn’t give up. She cried and pleaded until they finally let her go. She joined the protests, choosing to fight the dictatorship rather than sit in a classroom under their rule. But the choice broke her heart.
“Every time I realized my dream of being a teacher was gone forever, the tears just fell on their own,” she said softly. “I kept telling myself, in this life, I will never have my classroom.”
The following months were a living hell. Heavy fighting forced her family to flee into the jungle as refugees, surviving on daily wage labor. Though they eventually returned home, a new terror arrived in February 2024: the military’s forced conscription law. Young men and women were being dragged from their homes to fight for the junta.
Terrified of being taken, she made a desperate choice. With no money for legal passports, she took a dangerous illegal route to Malaysia, sleeping on the cold ground for six terrifying nights.
Today, Ma Pan Hmway works in a small restaurant in Malaysia. She sends money back to her family, but her life is a prison of fear. As an undocumented migrant, she lives in constant dread of immigration raids, known locally as Operasi.
“I am so scared of getting arrested,” she confessed. “Sometimes I stay out and don’t walk back to my room until midnight because people say the police don’t raid that late. During those lonely walks, I just want to go home so badly.”
If she gets caught, she will be deported back to Myanmar straight into the hands of the military that wants to force her into their army. Because of this fear, on her days off, she never steps outside her tiny room.
A power-hungry regime stole her dream. Yet, her spirit remains beautiful. From her cramped, lonely room in a foreign country, she takes a portion of her hard earned wages and sends it back to support children studying in Myanmar’s refugee camps.
She has lost her classroom, but she hasn’t lost her hope. She is still waiting for the day her country finds peace, so she can finally step back into a school and live the life she was meant to live.
